Former Cork orphanage site sale set for 18 luxury family homes

Positive prospects promised at Passage West's Mount Prospect period home and grounds

CGI of Mount Prospect, with original period home on right and FPP for 18 detached houses on 6.8 acres. Agent Michael Powell seeks €2.5m for the development opportunity

THE historic Cork harbour Mount Prospect house, for years an industrial school and orphanage, may anchor a development of 18 luxury, detached family homes, likely to be worth up to and over €1m apiece, according to the vendors of a ready-to-go hillside site in Passage West.

At the heart of the site just put back up for sale is the Victorian-era Mount Prospect, built 170 years ago for William Brown, co-founder of the Passage dockyard/ Royal Victoria Dockyard in 1849 at a time when Passage West was the busiest anchorage in Cork harbour, generating enormous mercantile wealth, and housing and villa grandeur.